Main menu

Jews

Ghislain Waterlot

1The Jewish people is the religious people par excellence.
If all nations have as their purpose to maintain themselves, each of them has
its specific difference, and Montesquieu asserts that the specificity of the
Jews is to have religion as the particular purpose of their laws (EL, XI, 5). In this respect, they even testify to an
“invincible obstinacy” (LP, 58 [60]) that can appear
surprising when one sees to what point they have been persecuted, but it is
explained by the overload of practices characteristic of their religion: “they
hold many things by which they are continually occupied” (EL, XXV, 2). The example of barbarian peoples, “solely occupied by
hunting or war”, confirms this affirmation since these peoples have no scruple
about renouncing their religion to adopt another. This religion of the Jews has
another singular characteristic, which is that it has given rise to two
extraordinarily expansionist religions which soon converted the world. So that,
supported by its two daughters, the Christian and Muslim religions, the Jewish
religion can both “embrace the whole world” (LP, 58 [60])
and pretend to dominate the whole of time, since it was so to speak born with
the world. Yet the Jewish religion is intolerant and considers the other
religions either as idolatrous, or as heretical (Christianity and Islam). The
Jews have not only been intolerant with respect to others, they have transmitted
the germ (the medical metaphor is classical and owes nothing to Montesquieu).
The spirit of intolerance (proselytism) and enthusiasm or “spirit of vertigo”
(LP, 83 [85]) have been communicated “like a
contagious and popular disease to the Mahometans and to the Christians” (ibid.). But note: the Jews are not the source of
intolerance and, remarkably enough, Montesquieu never yields to the temptation
to burden them as a special source of ills. Unlike a Voltaire, whose
antisemitism is virulent, as long as he holds Jews up for public obloquy,
Montesquieu always manifested the will to weigh things carefully. Also, far from
underscoring their unique character, as was usually done for better or worse,
Montesquieu puts forward their inscription in a history and insists on the
filiations or genealogies. Several times (for example EL,
XIV, 11 ; LP, 83 [85]) he shows that the Jews prolong the
Egyptians. Such is the case with intolerance: received from the Egyptians, the
evil was transmitted to the Jews but not created by them. Therefore Montesquieu
does not hesitate to compare the Jews to their powerful neighbors, even if, in a
youthful work (Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans
la religion, 1716), he reproached the Roman authors with confusing Jews
with the members of the sect of Serapis.

2In this context, it will not be surprising that the laws of the Hebrews never
constitute, in Montesquieu’s eyes, a model from which modern states should take
inspiration. Against Bossuet and the classical tradition, Montesquieu places
himself in the philosophical line illustrated by, among others, Spinoza, and
considers that one can take from the history of the Hebrews not a model, but
rather profitable lessons for understanding political problems in general. Thus
no privilege accorded to Jewish laws, neither positively nor negatively.
Moreover those laws are considered as human institutions and on a strictly human
plan. The consideration of Jewish laws as an expression of a theocracy is thus
discretely excluded. In fact, according to the figural situation, the Judaic
laws can be related and measured by the spirit of democratic, aristocratic,
monarchical or despotic government. There is therefore never an overall judgment
on the government of the ancient Jews, but only a scale, where the good and bad
laws are distributed on each side, relatively to the suitability or not with the
nature of such and such a government.

3From the perspective of the egalitarian spirit of democracy, one observes that
“the law that commanded that the closest relative should marry the female heir”
(EL, V, 5), so as to maintain “the equal sharing of
land” (ibid.) is a good one. In the framework of a
despotic government when polygamy is instituted, the Mosaic law requiring that
the first wife not see her conditions of existence reduced by the following one,
though less accomplished than Mahomet’s, which imposes an absolute equality, is
for that no less in conformity with the law “of equality of treatment” naturally
deduced from that of “the plurality of wives” (EL, XVI,
7). Just as “the laws of Moses” were very wise with respect to the right to
asylum, for they avoided abuse and the “gross contradiction” (EL, XXV, 3) of the protection of great criminals. They were the
expression of prudence itself, when they ruled with respect to lepers and
imposed isolation (EL, XIV, 11), and those laws ought to
be renewed, by the legislator concerned for public health, in the framework of
the struggle against syphilis. Finally, contrary to the laws of the
Christianized Romans (EL, XXIII, 22), the Hebraic
principles favored the propagation of the species (Pensées, no. 1942, transcribed between 1751 and 1754), and these
principles still work for modern Jews, since their faith in the Messiah to come
encourages every family to have many children (LP, 115
[119]).

4On the other hand, it is foolish to extend the law of the Sabbath to the
prohibition of defending oneself in case of aggression (EL, XXVI, 7). The Hebrews paid dearly this confusion of religious
precepts with those of natural law, insofar as it directly provoked their defeat
at the hands of Pompey. In another order of ideas, a pinch of barbarity appears
in the case of the legislation on slaves, for despotic governments that
institute it with relative legitimacy, in Montesquieu’s eyes, because of the
climate and the political principle (fear), must however establish it in a
gentle manner if they wish to make it tolerable or even desirable. But on the
subject of slaves, “the law of Moses was very harsh” since it prescribed that
the master could cause his slave to die without being prosecuted, on the sole
condition that the death not immediately follow on ill treatment. “What a people
would be one for which civil law had to be set free of natural law!” (EL, XV, 16 [17]). That is at bottom the most severe
attack which Montesquieu reserved to the Jews, and we can consider that it is
particularly moderate when we know how most other authors treat them. In the
long run, the scourge of the scale weighing the Hebrew laws leans generally to
the good side.

5As for the “modern” Jews (from the diaspora), Montesquieu is very sensitive to
their situation as the eternally persecuted. He returns often to this subject:
the cruelty with which all the nations have treated the Jews is contemptible.
The Romans scorned them and sent them to people Sardinia along with criminals
(LP, 118 [122]). The Visigoths discriminated against
them in humiliating fashion: they forced them to distinguish themselves by their
religion while preventing them from following the precepts of that very religion
(EL, XXIX, 16). Philippe le Long expelled them from
France under the pretext that they poisoned the springs “by means of the
leprous” (EL, XII, 5). This “public hatred” (ibid.) was again horribly illustrated until the 18th century by the Portuguese and Spanish
inquisitors, who treated them not so much as enemies of the Christian religion
as their own personal enemies (EL, XXV, 13). This hatred
sometimes turned against the persecutors themselves: it is probable that the
Visigoths lost Provence because of the Jews (or the Romans) who, persecuted,
made of that province a refuge and appealed to the Saracens (EL, XXVIII, 7). However, it was possible to hope for a progressive
exit from this awful era, insofar as Europe was beginning to understand the
advantage of toleration, the nature of true attachment to religion, and to
distinguish that attachment from persecutional zeal (LP,
58 [60], in fine; see also Pensées, no. 2159).

6But the most singular and troubling aspect of the persecution that has struck the
Jews is that it was not foreign to the development of trade. This phenomenon is
the occasion of one of the most remarkable chapters in L’Esprit des lois (XXI, 16 [20]) and we need to pause there to
conclude. If the Hebrew nation was not a trading nation, insofar as it was
“solely devoted to agriculture” (EL, XXI, 6) and
developed only an occasional luxury trade, tied to conquest, on the other hand
the modern Jews had been more or less forced to trade, since the Aristotelian
principles relative to political economy, adopted by medieval Europe, left to
Jews alone the possibility of lending with usury. Now trade does not live with
credit: someone had to provide that. All at once the Jews, disgraced by all,
behaved in dishonest fashion, as would any other man have done in such a
situation: they had a monopoly, they organized and, a concession of
Montesquieu’s to the public hatred, were “enriched by their exactions” (EL, XXI, 16 [20]). The princes did not fail to see in
them an easy source of pillage, for if the priests and lords were protected from
taxes by their privileges, the Jews were defenseless. They were treated
atrociously. But Montesquieu employs here, by anticipation, a dialectic of
negativity: from the denial of human rights can come the means of consolidating
those rights. The Jews, indeed, persecuted everywhere, invented the letter of
credit, a determining invention for all mankind, thanks to which violence can be
eluded, since “the richest merchant [had] only invisible holdings, that could be
sent anywhere, and left no trace anywhere” (ibid.). To be
sure, evil is not always the source of a good: the dark “speculations of
scholastics” destroyed trade and brought nothing but grief, but sometimes the
evil turns into its opposite, and that is what happened with the princes’
shameless avarice. The ignoble situation that was inflicted on modern Jews is
also what made them, in fact, the authors of what is, in the eyes of
Montesquieu, one of the greatest benefits for mankind: the development of
international trade, thanks to which mankind can ultimately be definitively
cured of Machiavellism.